Playwrights: The Ensemble
At: Walkabout Theater Company at Peter Jones Gallery, 1806 W. Cuyler
Phone: 312-458-0566; $15
Through Jan. 27
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
From staging plays in men's restrooms to a working laundromat, the Walkabout Theater Company is hellbent on making unconventional theater. Walkabout's latest project, Impossible Cities: A Utopian Experiment, lives up to the company's quirky reputation.
In Impossible Cities, five performance artists each find fear, fascination and funny jabs at idealistic American Utopias throughout history. And since its setting is an art gallery, Walkabout has invited groups of visual artists to graphically explore their own notions of Utopia. Add to the mix post-show live musicians with some tasty nibbles and you get the perfect thought-provoking night out.
As you get herded into the theater space by a forlorn and frazzled Jessica Hudson, you pick up on the notion that idealized civilizations are frequently striven for but, more often than not, are unattainable.
Hudson's role in Impossible Cities is to be the connective tissue to four segments on American Utopian communities. She incorporates building bricks and ends each segment by grasping at elusive cityscapes, but ends up repeating herself over and over.
The best piece in the bunch is a collaborative cooking show featuring the very funny pairing of Chloe Johnson and Seth Zurer. Both try to get in the mindset of two religious communities by creating historic recipes of the German Christian Pietists who thrived in Amana, Iowa, starting in 1855, and the failed Jewish 'Back-to-the-Soil' activists who floundered in turn-of-the-century Clarion, Utah.
Just watching Zurer's exasperated expressions as he creates a historically dubious kugel is hilarious, especially while eyeing Johnson's vegetable food art that illustrates Amana's success.
Ira S. Murfin delivers the driest segment on the still-growing urban laboratory of Arcosanti, Ariz. But Murfin's roundabout mental processes are also the most thought-provoking. Seated at a table with props and video footage, Murfin uses his own personal experience as a former spokesman for Paolo Soleri's ecological city. Although Arcosanti is actually 'anti-Utopian,' you do get what Soleri is striving for from Murfin's inverse reasoning.
Production artistic director Seth Bockley caps off the evening with an oblique and symbol-laden physical piece on Nauvoo, Ill. Known mostly as the first major Mormon community led by religious martyr Joseph Smith, Nauvoo subsequently was also the stomping grounds for rigid French communists under the tyrannical leadership of Etienne Cabet.
Bockley doesn't spell everything out, but allows simple actions of dropping stones or pulling strings to get his messages across while assuming the personas of the two Nauvoo leaders.
The whole package of Impossible Cities is aided by Steve Ritchey's great sound design, Mac Vaughey's stark lighting and Stephen Mazurek's ingenious up-close video projections. As a piece of educational art, Impossible Cities succeeds at drawing you in and provoking questions of what makes up ideal communities.